Renewed visions for the time ahead of breaking barriers and collective wisdom

It is always intriguing to see how Apurva is able to bring together organisations and domains to solve societal problems through the lens of collective wisdom. Here is the story of Catalyst Management Services (CMS), their journey with Apurva so far and their renewed visions for the future, stitched together from conversations with Raghunathan Narayanan, Co-Founder and Director, and Prerak Shah, Senior Associate. 

Catalyst Management Services (CMS) works on improving the health and well-being of each individual, especially the vulnerable communities. Aiming to improve 100 million lives of vulnerable populations, they share their thoughts on how Apurva.ai as an impact tool boosts their pace and efficiency to reach their goal.

Collectivised Wisdom

Prerak Shah, Senior Associate at CMS, describes how Apurva.ai emphasised the importance of collectivising knowledge and wisdom from multiple sources. This led to a shift in focus on how CMS is able to democratise wisdom curated instead of retaining it, thereby reaching and working with larger communities, and eventually benefitting the larger ecosystem. “When we started using Apurva for a few of the interactions, we were able to synthesise in a much more streamlined and structured manner, and we didn’t have to spend a lot of time synthesising this information as well, because it used to be more accessible and easily consumable.” Knowledge derived with the help of Apurva ranges from calls to actions, different themes emerging from conversations, and new insights from the field, which eventually get institutionalised within the organisation. 

Raghunathan Narayanan, Co-Founder and Director, further adds that collective wisdom is essential for their organisation as they repeatedly work on complex societal problems which are multidimensional and multi-layered. He goes on to emphasise the importance of collective wisdom by stating, “Every organisation takes a stance, has an approach on its own, and it looks at learnings from outside. Collective kind of wisdom is important as a particular context requires different solutions, and there’s no one solution which is workable everywhere.”

CMS and Apurva.ai

CMS has been in awe of Apurva.ai’s Power of Co-creation, the insights emerging from conversations and Apurva’s active role in the discussions. Similar to so many who have encountered Apurva, both Narayanan’s and Shah’s AHA moment was during their first interaction of querying Apurva. Narayanan shares, “When we came back and saw the output, I was wondering what was the possibility of a tool like this. It was about picking up those threads and giving back those points for further discussions, resulting in deepening the discussion.” Narayanan was impressed with the ability to derive meaningful insights from diverse community voices that are available immediately, thereby improving their ability to respond with various solutions quickly. Shah, on the other hand, was excited how Apurva was able to pick up nuances across different languages and geographies and synthesise all the knowledge curated, thereby breaking barriers present today.

Narayanan recalls querying the conversations from the women’s economic empowerment program and finding new insights on how women entrepreneurs are stigmatised, harassed, how they have to deal with English-speaking customers and more. Narayanan was astounded by the insights as they are not drawn out during their routine reviews. Shah too highlighted how they were able to derive insights from women entrepreneurs on the challenges and barriers they face, despite conversations being in local languages. 

Narayanan explains that Apurva fits perfectly with CMS’s goal to solve for vulnerable populations across different parts with context-relevant and quick responses. With Apurva, the collective wisdom emerging from conversational querying and institutional knowledge, from a specific theme or combination of themes and across languages, enhances problem-solving. “It is an impact tool, through which an organisation’s effectiveness can be improved. This will enable us to be able to deliver our work much better.”

Narayanan is specifically excited to build the agency of communities with Apurva.ai. Working across different domains, geographies and populations, he describes how CMS works on building responses to various problems faced by different populations. “Everybody brings their experiences together, their own reflections together around agency building, and Apurva can look at building for those specific units, and organisations, as a catalyst.”

Visions for the time ahead

Narayanan states that, “Apurva can be an enabler of organisations, a tool in which new perspectives can be built.” He elaborates how societal issues are extremely complex and systemic, making it difficult for people to learn and trace patterns by just reading and listening to people’s experiences. Instead, leveraging the time and work invested by people to understand the system can open new routes of looking at societal issues and approaches to solve them. This impact tool can play a significant role in improving effectiveness for policymakers, program planners, nano micro and small medium enterprises.

Shah envisions using Apurva with their communities and their ecosystem network to derive the pockets of wisdom that lies within these spaces, which leads to the crux of most of the work done by CMS. He claims that “The biggest value add will be at the community level because institutions can enable or push for it, but it is not necessarily valued at the community level. So once we understand and showcase the value of it to communities, it can be translated to the community institutions, then to the organisation and there’ll be more buying for the entire chain of people who are working for the community.” With the collective wisdom curated, Shah says they want to understand challenges at the community institutional level by going beyond implementation and also looking into design, network and methods to scale their solutions. 

Shah probes the relevance of Apurva with the question, “How do we bring different context-based knowledge to other places? Maybe not 100% fit, but at least 80%, which will lead to a decrease in discovery cost.” He further adds that this can be possible. “This can be enabled by Apurva if all the ecosystem players start using it and understand the value that each of them bring to the ecosystem. This can be translated to different geographies and different communities as well.”

Narayanan describes the journey of Apurva and CMS as a “highly co-creation process” where it is “helping others to learn and grow exponentially. To me, I think CMS and Apurva are in the pathway for collective impact.”